Xin nein kuai le!

Happy Lunar New Year to everyone! Last night we welcomed the year of the rat along with the other 1,321,851,888 people in this country. Our team went out to have a traditional Chinese dinner where we sat and ate for about two hours. After consuming squid, octopus, jellyfish, cucumber, pork, beef, shrimp, rice, noodles, deep fried bananas, bok choy, broccoli, chicken, fish, carrots, dumplings and beer we found ourselves full and extremely satisfied. As I'm sure you can imagine, I opted out of a few of the dishes but made an effort to try as much of it as my taste allowed.

Traditional Chinese tables are equipped with a rotating round piece in the middle (like a lazy susan) where the dishes are placed. Everyone at the table shares each dish as they come in one by one from the kitchen. It's nice to taste many different things over the course of the meal and talk with the rest of the people about the flavors, textures and spices.

After dinner last night we went on to a club called Mao where our contact person from the Fashion Hub (where we will have our Homebase during the next three months) had arranged entrance for us as well as a welcome drink. At 12am the sky exploded with fireworks in all directions. On the street crackers went off by the thousands and big clouds of smoke rose up around them.

Shanghai was quieter than I had expected for the festivities. Because most people spend this holiday with their families, many have left the city. We have been told to expect the traffic to be much thicker, the subways to be much more crowded etc in the following days/months.

I'm experiencing a couple technical difficulties at the moment so the photos on this posting are not my own. Stay tuned though...I'll sort out the issues with power cord, camera and internet connection and will keep sending updates out to you in cyberspace. It seems blogspot is blocked in China. So although I can sign in and post I am unable to view my own blog. Ah well!

The cafe is closing, so I'm off.
...Until next time, zai jian!